Fifteen years of the greatest rock and roll band in the world, played by New Orleans.

Stones Fest New Orleans exists because the Beatles Festival worked. By 2011, The New Orleans Beatles Festival had spent nine years proving that this city would turn out, year after year, for one catalog played properly by its own musicians. Chuck Credo IV wanted to know whether it would do the same thing twice, so he picked the only other catalog big enough to try it with.

Nobody in New Orleans had. For all the tribute nights this city has hosted, a Rolling Stones show played by New Orleans artists had never been attempted — and the reason is not mysterious. The Stones are harder than they sound. Sixty years of material, and almost none of it sits still: the early blues covers, the country records, the disco flirtations, the arena rock, and two guitars that weave around each other instead of trading turns. It takes a band that can play all of it, and a room full of singers willing to take one song apiece and mean it.

The first band was built for exactly that. John Papa Gros, Chuck Credo, Chad Gilmore, Alex McMurray and Jimmy Messa — five players with as much collective stage time as any rhythm section in Louisiana — ran the biggest songs in the Stones catalog and then got out of the way for whoever walked up to the microphone.

That is the part people come back for. The guest list over the years reads like a census of New Orleans music: Fred LeBlanc of Cowboy Mouth. Bonerama. Vernon Reid of Living Colour. Kevin Griffin of Better Than Ezra. Marc Broussard. Dave Malone of the Radiators. George Porter Jr. Each one takes a song, brings their own voice to it, and hands the night to the next singer. No two years have ever sounded the same, because no two singers in this city would choose the same Stones song.

It has packed every kind of room the city has. Mid-City Lanes Rock ’n’ Bowl, where it started and where the Beatles Festival started before it. The Maple Leaf. Southport Hall. Tipitina’s. And now the Jefferson Performing Arts Center — a full theater with a seated house, which tells you how far a one-off idea travelled in fifteen years.

What has not changed is the premise. This was never an impersonation show. Nobody wears a wig or works on the accent. It is a room full of Louisiana musicians who grew up on these records playing them at full strength for an audience that grew up on them too, and the difference between that and a costume act is audible from the back row.

Stones Fest is a New Orleans event with a New Orleans cast, and it stays here. If you want this music in your own room, the Rolling Stones Tribute Show travels as an added feature of Newspaper Taxi: A Beatles Tribute — same catalog, same standard, built to tour.